Tag Archives: segmentation

The equation in retail today is simple. Evolve or die. But if analytics is one of the core tools to drive successful evolution, we have a problem. From an analytics perspective, we’re used to a certain view of the store. We know how many shoppers we get (door counting) and we know what we sold. We know how many Associates we had. We (may) know what they sold. This isn’t dog food. If you had to pick a very small set of metrics to work with to optimize the store, most of these would belong. But we’re missing a lot, too. We’re missing almost any analytic detail around the customer journey in the store. That’s a particularly acute lack (as I noted in my last post) in a world where we’re increasingly focused on delivering (and measuring) better store experiences. In a transaction-focused world, transactions are the key measures. In an experience world? Not so much. So journey measurement is a critical component of today’s store optimization. And there’s the problem. Because the in-store measurement systems we have available are tragically limited. DM1, our new platform, is designed to fix that problem.

People like to talk about analytics as if it just falls out of data. As if analysts can take any data set and any tool and somehow make a tasty concoction. It isn’t true. Analytics is hard work. A really great analyst can work wonders, but some data sets are too poor to use. Some tools lock away the data or munge it beyond recognition. And remember, the most expensive part of analytics is the human component. Why arm those folks with tools that make their job slow and hard? Believe me, when it comes to getting value out of analytics, it’s hard enough with good tools and good data. You can kid yourself that it’s okay to get by with less. But at some point you’re just flushing your investment and your time away. In two previous posts, I called out a set of problems with the current generation of store customer measurement systems. Sure, every system has problems – no analytics tool is perfect. But some problems are much worse than others. And some problems cripple or severely limit our ability to use journey data to drive real improvement.

When it comes to store measurement tools, here are the killers: lack of segmentation, lack of store context, inappropriate analytics tools, inability to integrate Associate data and interactions, inability to integrate into the broader analytics ecosystem and an unwillingness to provide cleaned, event-level data that might let analysts get around these other issues.

Those are the problems we set out to solve when we built DM1.

Let’s start with Segmentation. Segmentation can sound like a fancy add-on. A nice to have. Important maybe, but not critical.

That isn’t right. Marketing analytics just is segmentation. There is no such thing as an average customer. And when it comes to customer journey’s, trying to average them makes them meaningless. One customer walks in the door, turns around and leaves. Another lingers for twenty minutes shopping intensively in two departments. Averaging the two? It means nothing.

Almost every analysis you’ll do, every question you’ll try to answer about store layout, store merchandising, promotion performance, or experience will require you to segment. To be able to look at the just the customers who DID THIS. Just the customers who experienced THAT.

Think about it. When you build a new experience, and want to know how it changed behavior you need to segment. When you change a greeting script or adjust a presentation and want to know if it improved store performance you need segmentation. When you change Associate interaction strategies and want to see how it’s impacting customer behavior you need segmentation. When you add a store event and want to see how it impacted key sections, you need segmentation. When you want to know what other stuff shoppers interested in a category cared about, you need segmentation. When you want to know how successful journeys differed from unsuccessful ones, you need segmentation. When you want to know what happens with people who do store pickup or returns, you need segmentation.

In other words, if you want to use customer journey tracking tools for tracking customer journeys, you need segmentation.

If your tool doesn’t provide segmentation and it doesn’t give the analyst access to the data outside it’s interface, you’re stuck. It doesn’t matter how brilliant you are. How clever. Or how skilled. You can’t manufacture segmentation.

Why don’t most tools deliver segmentation?

If it’s so important, why isn’t it there? Supporting segmentation is actually kind of hard. Most reporting systems work by aggregating the data. They add it up by various dimensions so that it can be collapsed into easily accessible chunks delivered up into reports. But when you add segmentation into the mix, you have to chunk every metric by every possible combination of segments. It’s messy and it often expands the data so much that reports take forever to run. That’s not good either.

We engineered DM1 differently. In DM1, all the data is stored in memory. What does that mean? You know how on your PC, when you save something to disk or first load it from the hard drive it takes a decent chunk of time? But once it’s loaded everything goes along just fine? That’s because memory is much faster than disk. So once your PowerPoint or spreadsheet is loaded into memory, things run much faster. With DM1, your entire data set is stored in-memory. Every record. Every journey. And because it’s in-memory, we can pass all your data for every query, really fast. But we didn’t stop there. When you run a query on DM1, that query is split up into lots of chunks (called threads) each of which process its own little range of data – usually a day or two. Then they combine all the answers together and deliver them back to you.

That means that not only does DM1 deliver reports almost instantaneously, it means we can run even pretty complex queries without pre-aggregating anything and without having to worry about the performance. Things like…segmentation.

Segmentation and DM1

In DM1, you can segment on quite a few different things. You can segment on where in the store the shopper spent time. You can segment on how much time they spent. You can segment on their total time in the store. You can segment on when they shopped (both by day of week and time of day). You can segment on whether they purchased or not. And even whether they interacted with an Associate.

If, for example, you want to understand potential cross-sells, you can apply a segment that selects only visitors who spent a significant amount of time shopping in a section or department. Actually, this undersells the capability because it’s in no way limited to any specific type of store area. You can segment on any store area down to the level of accuracy achieved by the collection architecture.

What’s more, DM1 keeps track of historical meta-data for every area of the store. Meaning that even if you changed, moved or re-sized an area of the store, DM1 still tracks and segments on it appropriately.

So if you want to see what else shoppers who looked at, for example, Jackets also considered, you can simply apply the segmentation. It will work correctly no matter how many times the area was re-defined. It will work even in store roll-ups with fundamentally different store types. And with the segment applied, you can view any DM1 visualization, chart or table. So you can look at where else Jacket Shoppers passed through, where they lingered, where they engaged more deeply, what else they were likely to buy, where they exited from, where they went first, where they spent the most time, etc. etc. You can even answer questions such as whether shoppers in Jackets were more or less likely to interact with Sales Associates in that section or another.

Want to see if Jacket shoppers are different on weekdays and weekends? If transactors are different from browsers? If having an Associate interaction significantly increases browse time? Well, DM1 let’s you stack segments. So you can choose any other filter type and apply it as well. I think the Day and Time part segmentation’s are particularly cool (and unusual). They let you seamlessly focus on morning shoppers or late afternoon, weekend shoppers or even just shoppers who come in over lunchtime. Sure, with door-counting you know your overall store volume. But with day and time-part segmentation you know volume, interest, consideration, and attribution for every measured area of the store and every type of customer for every hour and day of week.

DM1’s segmentation capability makes it easy to see whether merchandise is grouped appropriately. How different types of visitor journeys play out. Where promotional opportunities exist. And how and where the flow of traffic contradicts the overall store layout or associate plan. For identified shoppers, it also means you can create extraordinarily rich behavioral profiles that capture in near real-time what a shopper cares about right now.

It comes down to this. Without segmentation, analytics solutions are just baby toys. Segmentation is what makes them real marketing tools.

The Roadmap

DM1 certainly delivers far more segmentation than any other product in this space. But it’s still quite a bit short of what I’d like to deliver. I mean it when I say that segmentation is the heart and soul of marketing analytics. A segmentation capability can never be too robust.

Not only do we plan to add even more basic segmentation options to DM1, we’ve also roadmapped a full segmentation builder (of the sort that the more recent generation of digital analytics tools include). Our current segmentation interface is simple. Implied “ors” within a category and implied “ands” across segmentation types. That’s by far the most common type of segmentation analysts use. But it’s not the only kind that’s valuable. Being able to apply more advanced logic and groupings, customized thresholds, and time based concepts (visited before / after) are all valuable for certain types of analysis.

I’ve also roadmapped basic machine learning to create data-driven segmentations and a UI that provides a more persona-based approach to understanding visitor types and tracking them as cohorts.

The beauty of our underlying data structures is that none of this is architecturally a challenge. Creating a good UI for building segmentations is hard. But if you can count on high performance processing event level detail in your queries (and by high-performance I mean sub-second – check out my demos if you don’t believe me), you can support really robust segmentation without having to worry about the data engine or the basic performance of queries. That’s a luxury I plan to take full advantage of in delivering a product that segments. And segments. And segments again.

In the last few months I’ve been spending quite a bit of time thinking about the challenges in physical retail – stores. I’m going to be talking much more about that in the months to come, but thinking about the challenges in physical retail and whether and to what extent digital techniques might help, I’ve also had to think about why digital retail has evolved the way it has.

There’s no doubt that digital has disrupted and hurt traditional retail. But it’s a mistake to attribute that solely to advantages inherent in digital. After all, if it was just a matter of digital being superior to B&M, then Borders should have been fine moving online. That didn’t work out so well.

In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of our digital world is how a perfect leveling of the playing field has produced such a strong tendency to natural monopoly. This isn’t just about retail. In most of the key areas of internet – from retail to video streaming to music to search to ride summoning, we’ve seen an extraordinary tendency toward massive consolidation around a single leader.

It’s not exactly what most of us expected. By eliminating most barriers to entry, creating frictionless geographies, and creating technology environments that scale seamlessly to almost any size, the digital world has removed many of the traditional bastions of monopoly. Old-world monopolies used to spring from cases where scale precluded competition. If, for example, you owned the pipes that carried gas to homes or the wires that carried electricity, it was incredibly hard for anyone else to compete.

In today’s world, that kind of ownership has mostly vanished. You could argue that if you own search you own the pipes to the Web. But the analogy doesn’t hold. It doesn’t hold because anybody can create a competing search system at any time and every single internet user can have instant access to it. It doesn’t hold because there are multiple ways to pipe through the internet besides search. And it doesn’t hold because there really are no physical barriers to building or deploying that alternative search system.

So it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect the digital world to have morphed into a wild west of tiny artisanal companies with meteoric rises, equally sudden collapses, and constant, ubiquitous competition. Mostly, though, that’s not the way it looks at all. It looks as if monopoly, despite the absence of physical barriers, is actually a more powerful tendency in the digital world than the physical world.

It’s not that hard to understand why things have gone this way. Natural monopolies around things like electricity delivery occurred because of the immense friction involved in setting up the delivery system. Economies of scale were absolutely decisive in such situations. But most traditional markets are resilient to natural monopoly because of fundamental facts of the physical world that worked AGAINST too much scale. In the physical world, it makes perfect sense to have gas stations on the opposite side of a street. And it’s quite likely that two such stations can not only co-exist but thrive despite their close proximity. After all, it’s a pain to cross the street when you want to get gas. I may prefer Whole Foods to Safeway or vice versa. But I often go the grocery store that’s closest to me regardless of brand. And when I lived in San Francisco I bought most of my Diet Coke and impulse snacks at the corner store up my block. No, it wasn’t nice and it wasn’t cheap. But it sure was close. I may like Sol Food in San Rafael better than Los Moles, but so do a lot of other people – and I hate standing in line.

The natural friction that the physical world carries in terms of geographic convenience and capacity help ensure that countless niches for delivery exist. Like my old corner store, in the physical world, you can o be worse at everything except location and still thrive.

That doesn’t happen in the digital world.

It turns out – and I guess this should be no surprise – that in a frictionless world, any small advantage can be decisive. A grocery has to be a LOT better than its competitors to get me to drive an extra 10 minutes. But online, the best grocery is always just a few milliseconds away.

It doesn’t have to be a lot better. In fact, the difference can be incredibly tiny. Absent friction, the size of the advantage is no longer that meaningful. The digital world can make even tiny advantages decisive.

So why doesn’t every aspect of the digital world turn into a monopoly?

The answer lies in segmentation. A very small advantage may be decisive in the digital world. But it’s hard to have an advantage to EVERYONE.

In areas like news and entertainment, for example, it’s impossible to produce content that is better for everyone. Age, education, interest, background, geography and countless other factors create an infinity of micro-fractures. Not only is the content itself differentiated, but it’s creation is almost equally fractured. A.O. Scott could no more produce a version of Real Housewives than Andy Cohen could write a NY Times film review.

Content creation turns out to be friction-full in a way that was somewhat obscured by the old limitations in distribution. In fact, it appears that the market for segmented content and the ability of content to create barriers to consolidation is almost limitless. That’s why there’s almost nothing so important to becoming a good digital company than content creation. It’s the best way there is to guard your marketspace.

All this suggests that there are two paths to success in the digital world. One path involves scale and the other segmentation. They aren’t mutually exclusive and the companies that do both well are formidable indeed.

It’s only a little more than a month till the Digital Analytics Hub in Monterey and a chance to talk all things digital – both practical and philosophical. After all, there is no monopoly on great conversation. Looking forward to talking deep analytics, natural monopolies, digital transformation and digital advantage!

I’ve been planning my schedule for the DA Hub in late September and while I find it frustrating (so much interesting stuff!), it’s also enlightening about where digital analytics is right now and where it’s headed. Every conference is a kind of mirror to its industry, of course, but that reflection is often distorted by the needs of the conference – to focus on the cutting-edge, to sell sponsorships, to encourage product adoption, etc. With DA Hub, the Conference agenda is set by the enterprise practitioners who are leading groups – and it’s what they want to talk about. That makes the conference agenda unusually broad and, it seems to me, uniquely reflective of the state of our industry (at least at the big enterprise level).

So here’s a guided tour of my DA Hub – including what I thought was most interesting, what I choose, and why. At the end I hope that, like Indiana Jones picking the Holy Grail from a murderers row of drinking vessels, I chose wisely.

Session 1 features conversations on Video Tracking, Data Lakes, the Lifecycle of an Analyst, Building Analytics Community, Sexy Dashboards (surely an oxymoron), Innovation, the Agile Enterprise and Personalization. Fortunately, while I’d love to join both Twitch’s June Dershewitz to talk about Data Lakes and Data Swamps or Intuit’s Dylan Lewis for When Harry (Personalization) met Sally (Experimentation), I didn’t have to agonize at all, since I’m scheduled to lead a conversation on Machine Learning in Digital Analtyics. Still, it’s an incredible set of choices and represents just how much breadth there is to digital analytics practice these days.

Session 2 doesn’t make things easier. With topics ranging across Women in Analytics, Personalization, Data Science, IoT, Data Governance, Digital Product Management, Campaign Measurement, Rolling Your Own Technology, and Voice of Customer…Dang. Women in Analytics gets knocked off my list. I’ll eliminate Campaign Measurement even though I’d love to chat with Chip Strieff from Adidas about campaign optimization. I did Tom Bett’s (Financial Times) conversation on rolling your own technology in Europe this year – so I guess I can sacrifice that. Normally I’d cross the data governance session off my list. But not only am I managing some aspects of a data governance process for a client right now, I’ve known Verizon’s Rene Villa for a long time and had some truly fantastic conversations with him. So I’m tempted. On the other hand, retail personalization is of huge interest to me. So talking over personalization with Gautam Madiman from Lowe’s would be a real treat. And did I mention that I’ve become very, very interested in certain forms of IoT tracking? Getting a chance to talk with Vivint’s Brandon Bunker around that would be pretty cool. And, of course, I’ve spent years trying to do more with VoC and hearing Abercrombie & Fitch’s story with Sasha Verbitsky would be sweet. Provisionally, I’m picking IoT. I just don’t get a chance to talk IoT very much and I can’t pass up the opportunity. But personalization might drag me back in.

In the next session I have to choose between Dashboarding (the wretched state of as opposed to the sexiness of), Data Mining Methods, Martech, Next Generation Analytics, Analytics Coaching, Measuring Content Success, Leveraging Tag Management and Using Marketing Couds for Personalization. The choice is a little easier because I did Kyle Keller’s (Vox) conversation on Dashboarding two years ago in Europe. And while that session was probably the most contentious DA Hub group I’ve ever been in (and yes, it was my fault but it was also pretty productive and interesting), I can probably move on. I’m not that involved with tag management these days – a sign that it must be mature – so that’s off my list too. I’m very intrigued by Akhil Anumolu’s (Delta Airlines) session on Can Developers be Marketers? The Emerging Role of MarTech. As a washed-up developer, I still find myself believing that developers are extraordinarily useful people and vastly under-utilized in today’s enterprise. I’m also tempted by my friend David McBride’s session on Next Generation Analytics. Not only because David is one of the most enjoyable people that I’ve ever met to talk with, but because driving analytics forward is, really, my job. But I’m probably going to go with David William’s session on Marketing Clouds. David is brilliant and ASOS is truly cutting edge (they are a giant in the UK and global in reach but not as well known here), and this also happens to be an area where I’m personally involved in steering some client projects. David’s topical focus on single-vendor stacks to deliver personalization is incredibly timely for me.

Next up we have Millennials in the Analytics Workforce, Streaming Video Metrics, Breaking the Analytics Glass Ceiling, Experimentation on Steroids, Data Journalism, Distributed Social Media Platforms, Customer Experience Management, Ethics in Analytics(!), and Customer Segmentation. There are several choices in here that I’d be pretty thrilled with: Dylan’s session on Experimentation, Chip’s session on CEM and, of course, Shari Cleary’s (Viacom) session on Segmentation. After all, segmentation is, like, my favorite thing in the world. But I’m probably going to go with Lynn Lanphier’s (Best Buy) session on Data Journalism. I have more to learn in that space, and it’s an area of analytics I’ve never felt that my practice has delivered on as well as we should.

In the last session, I could choose from more on Customer Experience Management, Driving Analytics to the C-Suite, Optimizing Analytics Career-Oaths, Creating High-Impact Analytics Programs, Building Analytics Teams, Delivering Digital Products, Calculating Analytics Impact, and Moving from Report Monkey to Analytics Advisor. But I don’t get to choose. Because this is where my second session (on driving Enterprise Digital Transformation) resides. I wrote about doing this session in the EU early this summer – it was one of the best conversations around analytics I’ve had the pleasure of being part of. I’m just hoping this session can capture some of that magic. If I didn’t have hosting duties, I think I might gravitate toward Theresa Locklear’s (NFL) conversation on Return on Analytics. When we help our clients create new analytics and digital transformation strategies, we have to help them justify what always amount to significant new expenditures. So much of analytics is exploratory and foundational, however, that we don’t always have great answers about the real return. I’d love to be able to share thoughts on how to think (and talk) about analytics ROI in a more compelling fashion.

All great stuff.

We work in such a fascinating field with so many components to it. We can specialize in data science and analytics method, take care of the fundamental challenges around building data foundations, drive customer communications and personalization, help the enterprise understand and measure it’s performance, optimize relentlessly in and across channels, or try to put all these pieces together and manage the teams and people that come with that. I love that at a Conference like the Hub I get a chance to share knowledge with (very) like-minded folks and participate in conversations where I know I’m truly expert (like segmentation or analytics transformation), areas where I’d like to do better (like Data Journalism), and areas where we’re all pushing the outside of the envelope (IoT and Machine Learning) together. Seems like a wonderful trade-off all the way around.

For most of this year I’ve been writing an extended series on digital transformation in the enterprise. Along the way, I’ve described why organizations (particularly large ones) struggle with digital, the core capabilities necessary to do digital well, and ways in which organizations can build a better, more analytic culture. I’ve even put together a series of videos that describe how enterprises are currently driving digital and how they can do better.

I think both the current-state (what we do wrong) and the end-state (doing digital right) are compelling. In the next few posts, I’m going to wrap this series up with a discussion around how you get from here to there.

I don’t suppose anyone thinks the journey from here to there is trivial. Doing digital the way I’ve described it (see the Agile Organization) involves some pretty fundamental change: change to the way enterprises budget, change to the way they organize, and change to the way they do digital at almost every level. It also involves, and this is totally unsurprising, investments in people and technology and more than a dollop of patience. It would actually be much easier to build a good digital organization from scratch than to adapt the pieces that exist in the typical enterprise.

Change is harder than creation. It has more friction and more fail points. But change is the reality for most enterprise.

So where do you start and how do you go about building a great digital organization?

I’m going to answer that question here from an analytics perspective. That’s the easy part. Once I’ve worked through the steps in building analytics maturity and digital decisioning, I’ll tackle the organizational component, wherein I expect to hazard a series of guesses, speculation and unlikely theory to paper over the fact that almost no one has done this transformation successfully and every organization has fundamentally unique structures and people that make its dynamics deeply specific.

The foundation of any analytics program is, of course, data. One of the most satisfying developments in digital analytics in the past 3-5 years has been the dramatic improvement in the state of data collection. It used to be that EVERY engagement we undertook began with a plodding slog through data auditing and clean-up. These days, that’s more the exception than the rule. Still, there are plenty of exceptions. So the first step in just about any analytics effort is to make sure the data foundation is solid. There’s a second aspect to this that’s worth pointing out. For a lot of my clients, basic data collection is no longer much of an issue. But even where that’s true, there are often significant gaps in digital analytics data collection for personalization. So many Adobe designs are predicated on meeting reporting requirements that it’s not at all unusual for key personalization elements like filtering selections, image expansions, sorting behaviors and DHTML exposures to go largely untracked. That’s true on both the Web and Mobile sides. Part of auditing your data collection should be a careful look at whether your capturing all the personalization cues you could – and that’s often a critical foundational element for the steps to follow.

Right along with auditing your data collection comes building a comprehensive customer journey framework. I’ve added the word “framework” here not to be all “consulty” but to emphasize that a customer journey isn’t built once as a static map. That’s the old way – and it’s wrong in every respect (so be careful what you buy). It’s wrong because it’s not segmented. It’s wrong because it’s too high-level. And most of all it’s wrong because it’s too static. So while a customer journey framework is more a capability and a process than a “thing”, it’s also true that you have to start somewhere. Getting that initial segmented journey map in place provides the high-level strategic framework for your digital strategy and for your analytics and testing. It’s the key strategic piece welding your operational capabilities to your strategic vision.

My third foundational building block is (Chorus sings refrain) “2-Tiered segmentation”. I’ve written voluminously on digital segmentation and how it works, so I won’t add much more here. But if journey mapping is the piece linking your strategic vision to your operational capabilities, 2-tiered segmentation is the equivalent piece linking at the tactical level. At every touchpoint in a customer journey there is the need to understand who somebody is and where in their journey they are. That’s what 2-tiered segmentation provides.

Auditing your data, creating a journey mapping and tying that to a digital segmentation are truly foundational. They are all “you can’t get there from here without going through these” kind of activities. Almost every significant report, analysis and decision that you make will rely on these three activities.

That’s not really true for my next two foundational activities. I chose building an integrated voice of customer (VoC) capability as my fourth key building block. If you’ve read my book, you know that one of the main uses for a VoC program is to refine and tune your journey map and segmentation. So in one sense, this capability may be prior to either of those. But you can do enough VoC to support those two activities without really building a full VoC program. And what I have in mind here is a full program. What do I mean by a full program? I mean an enterprise feedback management system that makes it easy to deploy surveys at any point in the journey across any device. I mean a set of organizational processes that ideate, design, deploy, interpret and socialize VoC information constantly. I mean an enterprise-wide reporting capability that integrates different VoC sources, classifies them, tracks them, and provides drill-down (and that’s important because VoC data is virtually useless without cross-tabulation) access to them across the organization. I also mean a culture where one of the natural and immediate parts of making a decision is looking at what customer’s think and – if that isn’t available – launching a survey to figure it out. I put VoC as part of this foundational set because I think it’s one of the easiest ways to deliver real wins to the organization. I also like the idea of driving a combination of tactical (data, segmentation) and strategic (journey, VoC) initiatives in your early phases. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, we analytics folks tend to over-focus on the tactical.

Finally, I’ve included building a campaign measurement framework into the initial set of foundational activities. This might not be the right choice for every organization, but if you spend a significant amount of money on marketing, it’s a critical element in evolving your maturity. Like data audits, a lot of my clients are already pretty good at this. For many folks, campaigns are already measured using a pretty rich and well-thought out framework and the pain point tends to be deeper – around attribution and mix. But I also see organizations jumping right to questions of attribution before they’ve really done the work necessary to pick the right KPIs to optimize against. That’s a prescription for disaster. If you don’t put in the intellectual sweat equity to understand how campaigns should be measured (and it’s often surprisingly complicated in real-world businesses where conversion rate is rarely the be-all-and-end-all of optimization), then your attribution modelling is doomed to fail.

So here’s the first five things to tackle in building out the analytics part of a digital transformation effort:

These five activities provide a rich foundation for analytics driven transformation along with some core strategic analytic capabilities. I’ll cover what comes after this in my next post.

I’ve put together a short 20 minute video that’s a companion piece to Measuring the Digital World. It’s a guided tour through the core principles of digital analytics and a really nice introduction to the book and the field:

Measuring the Digital World : Introduction

An Introduction to Digital Analytics

The video introduces the unique challenges of measuring the digital world. It’s a world where none of our traditional measurement categories and concepts apply. And it doesn’t help that our tools mostly point us in the wrong direction – introducing measurement categories that are unhelpful or misleading. To measure the digital world, we need to understand customer experiences not Websites. That isn’t easy when all you know is what web pages people looked at!

But it’s precisely that leap – from consumption to intent – that underlies all digital measurement. The video borrows an example from the book (Conan the Librarian) to show how this works and why it can be powerful. This leads directly to the concepts of 2-Tiered segmentation that are central to MTDW and are the foundation of good digital measurement.

Of course, it’s not that easy. Not only is making the inference from consumption to intent hard, it’s constantly undermined by the nature of digital properties. Their limited real-estate and strong structural elements – designed to force visitors in particular directions – make it risky to assume that people viewed what they were most interested in.

This essential contradiction between the two most fundamental principles of digital analytics is what makes our discipline so hard and (also) so interesting.

Finally, the video introduces the big data story and the ways that digital data – and making the leap from consumption to intent – challenges many of our traditional IT paradigms (not to mention our supposedly purpose-built digital analytics toolkit).

Give it a look. Even if you’re an experience practitioner I think you’ll find parts of it illuminating. And if you’re new to the field or a consumer of digital reporting and analytics, I don’t think you could spend a more productive 20 minutes.

Since I finished Measuring the Digital World and got back to regular blogging, I’ve been writing an extended series on the challenges of digital in the enterprise. Like many analysts, I’m often frustrated by the way our clients approach decision-making. So often, they lack any real understanding of the customer journey, any effective segmentation scheme, any real method for either doing or incorporating analytics into their decisioning, anything more than a superficial understanding of their customers, and anything more than the empty façade of a testing program. Is it any surprise that they aren’t very good at digital? This would be frustrating but understandable if companies simply didn’t invest in these capabilities. They aren’t magic, and no large enterprise can do these things without making a significant investment. But, in fact, many companies have invested plenty with very disappointing results. That’s maddening. I want to change that – and this series is an extended meditation on what it takes to do better and how large enterprises might truly gain competitive advantage in digital.

I hope that reading these posts is useful to people, but I know, too, that it’s hard to get the time. Heaven knows I struggle to read the stuff I’d like to. So I took advantage of the slow time over the holidays to do something that’s been on my wish list for about 2 years now – take some of the presentations I do and turn them into full online webinars. I started with a whole series that captures the core elements of this series – the challenge of digital transformation.

There are two versions of this video series. The first is a set of fairly short (2-4 minute) stories that walk through how enterprise decision-making gets done, what’s wrong with the way we do it, and how we can do better. It’s a ten(!) part series and meant to be tackled in order. It’s not really all that long…like I said, most of the videos are just 2-4 minutes long. I’ve also packaged up the whole story (except Part 10) in single video that runs just a little over 20 minutes. It’s shorter than viewing all 10 of the others, but you need a decent chunk of uninterrupted time to get at it. If you’re really pressed and only want to get the key themes without the story, you can just view Parts 8-10.

Check it out and let me know what you think! To me it seems like a faster, better, and more enjoyable way to get the story about digital transformation and I’m hoping it’s very shareable as well. If you’re struggling to get analytics traction in your organization, these videos might be an easy thing to share with your CMO and digital channel leads to help drive real change.

I have to say I enjoyed doing these a lot and they aren’t really hard to do. They aren’t quite professional quality, but I think they are very listenable and I’ll keep working to make them better. In fact, I enjoyed doing the digital transformation ones so much that I knocked out another this last week – Big Data Explained.

This is one of my favorite presentations of all time – it’s rich in content and intellectually interesting. Big data is a subject that is obscured by hype, self-interest, and just plain ignorance; everyone talks about it but no one has a clear, cogent explanation of what it is and why it’s important. This presentation deconstructs the everyday explanation about big data (the 4Vs) and shows why it misses the mark. But it isn’t designed to merely expose the hype, it actually builds out a clear, straightforward and important explanation of why big data is real, why it challenges common IT and analytics paradigms, and how to understand whether a problem is a big data problem…or not. I’ve written about this before, but you can’t beat a video with supporting visuals for this particular topic. It’s less than fifteen minutes and, like the digital transformation series, it’s intended for a wide audience. If you have decision-makers who don’t get big data or are skeptical of the hype, they’ll appreciate this straightforward, clear, and no-nonsense explication of what it is.

This is also a significant topic toward the end of Measuring the Digital World where I try to lay out a forward looking plan for digital analytics as a discipline.

I’m planning to do a steady stream of these videos throughout the year so I’d love thoughts/feedback if you have suggestions!

Next week I hope to have an update on my EY Counseling Family’s work in the 538 Academy Awards challenge. We’ve built our initial Hollywood culture models – it’s pretty cool stuff and I’m excited to share the results. Our model may not be as effective as some of the other challengers (TBD), but I think it’s definitely more fun.

People have struggled with this (big) data provider model but Factual feels like it’s found a real (and valuable) niche. Would love to see more of this grow since external data is a huge miss in most big data systems.

Targeted VoC is a powerful (and totally neglected) tool for personalization. Facebook’s experience is entirely relevant to ANY content producer. I don’t know if I can take credit for this, but I suggested this to folks at Facebook a couple of years back!

An interesting discussion of the problems in identifying “likely” voters and the benefits of behavioral data integration. Food for thought in the enterprise world as well where the equivalent is often possible but rarely done.